What We Hoped Shield Pro Would Be

When we released Shield Pro in November 2017, we priced it at rock-bottom – $1/month per site.

The reason for this was the goal for mass-adoption. $1/month is affordable for everyone. Absolutely no-one could say we priced it too high. And so far no-one has asked for a discount… yet.

We sent out a survey beforehand to our members and asked – if we offered a Pro version, would you likely upgrade?

– Approximately 50% of respondents said yes to this.

Great, we thought, we have a market to support us in taking Shield to the “next level”.

And so Shield Pro was born.

What Shield Pro Has Now Become

As is our style, we’ve now surveyed all our Shield Pro customers.

Of those that have responded, 10% stated that their #1 motivation to “Go Pro” was to support future development.

7.7% – that’s less than 1 in 13 people were driven primarily to support the continued development of Shield.

This is a clear message.

It tells us that supporting future development doesn’t primarily interest our userbase, even if they think it does. Our current customers are far more interested in the added features that come with it.

Sounds obvious perhaps, but in this game, assumptions will kill your business. So we make sure we understand our customers, by asking their opinions directly.

How Shield Pro Gets New Features

There’s only 1 way Shield/Pro gets new features – hours and hours of development.

Then there’s the added costs to document new features, write articles about it, support it, and produce helpful videos etc.

This costs money and it’s not cheap.

But our clients have told us, in no uncertain terms:

Our primary motivation to support Shield is for the new features, not an overriding drive to support continued development.

And that’s okay.

We had hoped for greater support of Shield Pro by the current userbase, and it hasn’t happened.

And that’s okay, too. 🙂

We just needed to know where we all stand.

What This Means For Shield vs Shield Pro Going Forward

The clear conclusion from this, is that for Shield Pro to have a future, it must be clearly set-apart from Shield (free). There must be a compelling reason for customers to support the project, or they simply wont.

You have spoken – “Supporting future and continued development” in general terms isn’t a compelling enough reason to go Pro.

Going forward we need to be pragmatic if we’re going to keep our overarching goal alive.

To achieve this, we have decided to drop our commitment to “all security features are free”.

Existing Free Features Will Always Be Free

We received a review on WordPress.org by a user that thought we’d removed an previously existing free feature. Turns out it was just a malicious review, but it concerned us that this was perhaps the perception.

Thankfully it’s the only mention of this perception anywhere that we can find.

So let us state for the record: any pre-existing features of Shield Security before the Pro version was released will always remain free.

That is to say, if you’re sticking with the free version, you’ll never lose any existing features.

Future Features Will Be Assessed On A Per-Feature Basis

If we feel a feature deserves to be released for free, we’ll do so wherever possible.

We may release new features to Pro, and then later make it available in the free version. This will be assessed on an ongoing basis.

Hi, Paul and the rest of the team.
I have been using Shield for almost three years. I love the way it works and how easy it is to configure.
Thank you for continued development. I hope more users will support Pro and help continue the development of new features.

Thank you for bringing this awesome security plugin. I am using the Pro version on my blog and loving it. I will move all my other sites to premium version soon.

Your hard work for the free version of the plugin is incredible. It is not free for you still. You have invested lots of time and energy and we wish you get some appreciation for your work. While the Wordfence pro making one businessman smile, you are making 100 creative peoples smiles. Please keep the good work up. 🙂